.NET Framework and COM

Question

I was speaking to someone the other day who asked me if I developed in Java. When I said my skills were in the .NET Framework technologies he said that these were the devil incarnate. I don't want to open age-old debates but he said one thing that I had not heard said before and wondered if anyone could shed some light.

He said that the .NET Framework was built on top of COM. Is this true? Could someone expand please?

Answer 1

Parts of the framework on Windows were implemented on top of com (that is, the implementation used COM objects) - this has become less and less true in every coming version of .NET.

If, however, you are talking about the compiler and the runtime (rather than the .NET libraries and code written in .NET languages), I believe these were written in c++ and do probably use COM (again, on Windows).

There are alternate implementations of .NET, most notably Mono, which runs on Linux/Mac/Andriod and Windows. Since most of these platforms do not have COM, as you can see, .NET doesn't have to use COM at all.

It's just how some of the MS .NET framework has been implemented.